All good writing begins with terrible first efforts.
(Anne Lamott)

Madness to our methods?

I mentioned last week that we had a great meeting with Jim's U-W rhetorical theory seminar students in Seattle. I'd like to pick up one of the threads of our conversation here. During our meeting the question of methods came up, phrased something like: "Do students really need a traditional 'methods section' in their dissertations anymore?" As someone relatively new to graduate advising (my students won't be happy to hear me describe myself that way, I fear), I confess to a lot of angst about this question. My first impulse might be characterized as the old fogey defense: I had to write one, shouldn't they?

Maybe not. The obligatory methods section feels to me more and more like a prehensile tail, something rhetorical critics evolved at one point because it was institutionally useful (particularly in communication departments concerned with questions of legitimacy in the academy). First of all, does anybody really work that way? Aren't most of us using a variety of "methods" and approaches in our work? Most rhetorical critics and historians approach discourse more or less inductively, and adjust their critical approaches accordingly. And I could be wrong, but it doesn't seem that my friends on the rhetoric/composition side of things have anxiety about "methods" in quite the same way. Yet many of our criticism textbooks (even at the graduate level) are still organized by "method." And uncomfortably so, if the latest edition of the top reader in rhetorical criticism is any indication. The editor of that book recognizes things have changed, I think; in his preface he outlines changes from the earlier edition, and these changes, to my eye, make the reader a bit less methods-obsessed.

One of the things I told the students is that I think it's more important to push them about "assumptions" instead, asking them to think about and formulate answers to questions like, "What assumptions about communication/discourse/rhetoric/your topic area are you making in this project?" and then tie those answers to the specific choices they make in the dissertation. For example, I digested a long and meandering "methods" section from my dissertation into what I think is a nice, concise, page and a half in my book that explains what assumptions I make when I study photographs rhetorically and how that affects what readers will see me do in the book. This is probably what we really mean by methods anyway, and it also seems more useful in the long run, particularly when our scholarship reaches out beyond the boundaries of the field and when rhetoric is becoming more and more of a book culture. Still, I sometimes worry about how this goes over in communication departments where social science colleagues already worry, during job talks or committee meetings, about what they sometimes call the imprecision of our "methods." If there is no section clearly marked "methods," won't we seem even more imprecise?

I largely avoid the methods question in my undergraduate rhetorical criticism course, because there I'm much more focused on issues of invention and writing. I'd like to do the same for the grad seminar I may be teaching next year, but I also feel some obligation to take up the methods question in some way. I wonder if one solution may be to treat method madness as an historical moment in the story of rhetorical criticism as it has emerged in communication departments. That way we can consider both what "method" gives us and also how it limits us.

Comments

This is a great question. I would say a methods chapter is important for a number of reasons: it forces you to think about the way that you work, or to bring out the (typically fiendishly) inductive was in which one works; writing one is a process of self-identity. Second, it's helpful for the committee for evaluating your process, and most especially for an outside person who has no clue about the ways in which rhetoricians "riff." Third, you can easily cut it out for the book and perhaps turn it into an article on method or approach (that's what I did, although I had three methods chapters and one of them just got cut out and thrown in the garbage because no one likes Fredric Jameson, which is a shame).

A methods chapter can also be good if one envisions a wider audience for the dissertation/book than one's immediate field. This way you can sort of address it for the newcomer. I remember Ralph Cintron has a nice riff on method in one of his books.

Admittedly, methods chapters look odd in books these days, but I still think they are more than a vestige. I don't disagree with your points, however; certainly some kinds of projects need not go through it if its unnecessary.

re: methods, i have been caught off guard a few times when people ask me my methodology. i felt like i was supposed to say one instantly recognizable word, like, "reductionism" or "ethnography." method descriptions make a lot more sense to me when freed from such, er, rhetorical demands, and instead spell out how concepts were produced, their process, ideology and scope, for example. it does seem like people use the word "method" to refer to one of these things, but not always the same one.

I teach the intro to grad study "methods"-like course and grapple with this issue pretty much every year. While "method" certainly retains a stronghold in the social sciences, I would agree that notions of critical perspective or process suit folks leaning in the rheotric and performance direction. What I have been finding in the practice of advising is that the traditional functions of the "lit review" and "method section" occasionally merge. Particularly when the critical process and perspective are initmately interwoven with the conceptual and theoretical stakes of the project.

I wonder if we're conflating two terms that are slightly different - "methodology" and "method". I was always drilled that "methodology" is the broader set of assumptions that inform your work, your rationale for your methods, while method itself is literally the concrete procedure you follow in your work. It's the latter that is hardest to do with absolute clarity, I think, when you aren't in a discipline where you poke people or survey them or conduct statistical tests. I'm often tempted simply to say, "I stare at pictures and write about them."

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